Goodreads

Follow Blog via Email

What I am reading whilst I (impatiently) wait for Ali Smith’s Spring (because we’re not even at the solstice yet), a list: The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot: is there a more iconic first line in poetry? April is the cruellest month. But is it? A month of riotous greens and pinks that shines light on just how […]

I saw Call Me By Your Name twice. Once, after work in a near empty cinema with a bag of caramel popcorn and no knowledge of what I was about to see. I cycled home in the rain, buoyed by the heady images of an Italian summer: arts and classics and introspection and lust and swimming and […]

Wakefulness, darkness that comes with the inability to sleep, “the silent realms” (as Virginia Woolf calls it). Insomnia. A romp through literature, culture, and her own bed, Marina Benjamin’s memoir Insomnia found me in the deep hours of the night, plagued by the pursuit of sleep. Not chronic insomnia, that awful mistress that so many suffer from, […]

It’s the flash and glare, the speckle, the flare of colour refracted through the camera lens that simultaneously blinds and binds me. The haze of a dawn, with the sky shot through; the shadow and the shade, the soft movement of time tapped out across a blank wall. I watch and wait for it to […]

Writing and Art: intertwined and side by side, they speak so closely to one another it’s almost as if the two whisper – sharing ideas and pages, characters and settings and style. Flashes of delight in the mind and a residue of thought. There’s always been care taken when it comes to cover design, but […]

A new Murakami is a strange and wonderful thing. A tome, destined to be read by millions and perfectly formed as a material object – bound in circles, that seemingly constant shape that seems to run throughout his work, and echoed across dust covers and paperbacks alike. How does one begin when writing about the […]

I finished rereading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. Last time I read it I wrote myself a hangover cure: visit the V&A museum, take up pottery, frolic in the English countryside, read Peter Pan, drink tea, sleep. So, behold, a collection of cures for that book that made you suffer: the best of the reading remedies. Normal […]